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Suite Precure

Suite Precure began airing in 2011, and like all Precure series, lasted an entire year. This installment in the franchise was directed by Munehisa Sakai, and as the name of the series implies, it had a pretty prominent music theme going on (on a very shallow level only; unfortunately it spends most of its time either ignoring the music theme or discriminating against music that isn’t happy and clefs that aren’t treble).

Suite Precure was actually my first Precure series, and though I’ve said all sorts of unsavory things about it in other posts which were not about Suite Precure, it was the series that got me into both Precure and magical girl series in general. How can this be?! You will have to read to find out.

First, to shower endless praises onto Suite Precure. Guys guys guys! Did you hear? The music is composed by Yasuharu Takanashi, and as you should expect from that name, it is great! At worst tracks are predictable, and at best they are the heart of why I was able to watch all 48 of its episodes, even during the long stretches of episodes without merit.

There’s quite a bit to say about the visuals in Suite Precure. The character designs are done by Akira Takahashi, and they’re definitely nice to look at. Everything’s pretty and filled with colour. Even the supporting cast have designs that are quite pleasing to the eye. However, I would say that the animation is slightly below par for what I’d expect from a Precure series.

It’s typical in Precure for there to be few moments of noteworthy animation and many moments of derpworthy off-model shots. This is usually balanced out by a handful of segments of amazing animation… Suite Precure barely has any of that. Instead it makes up for that lack by having the most glorious stock footage I’ve seen in animation yet, with possible exceptions if we include opening sequences.

Inevitably, in each episode of Suite Precure you are going to have at least one (and more likely at least two) instance(s) of stock footage. Because Suite Precure, as a magical girl anime, has transformation scenes and special attacks. Stock footage kind of goes with the formula in a show like this. But Suite Precure’s stock sequences are special. They have this shading and finish to the colors that makes them look amazing, and the choreography in some of them is pretty cool.

People usually complain about stock footage because you are watching the same thing every single time, but it looks so amazing in Suite Precure that you really don’t care anymore. And besides that, Suite Precure has a lot of different attacks and varieties of attacks that all use at least slightly different animation. There’s enough freshness to be found here that it doesn’t feel all that repetitive, so instead it feels like a treat each time stock sequences come up.

Now, for the story and characters. The characters are definitely somewhat problematic. Early on, two of the main characters get into the most absurd arguments which are only caused by things that are not essentially stupid misunderstandings about half the time. It’s annoying and rather difficult to really understand, much like the previous sentence. On the bright side, the other half of the time it’s a more genuine clash of personalities, which is completely acceptable. In fact, their interaction is actually fairly enjoyable at this point. But things happen as the series go on that basically completely destroy this entire paragraph.

More characters join the main group. Apparently Suite Precure never got the memo about maintaining balance. So when the first new character is introduced to the group, not only did that character seem to lose something that seemed integral to her personality, but Kanade stopped existing.

That nice dynamic between best friends Hibiki and Kanade? Yeah, better get a funeral planned out for that. It gets worse when they introduce a fourth character to the group, because she also seems to lose a strong aspect of her personality when she joins and then Kanade becomes a ghost who just says the things that anyone would have said instead of a character who says the things Kanade would say.

It was really just a mess in regards to the handling of the characters. The story itself isn’t exactly exempt from messiness, either. Thematically speaking, especially. It starts out with a clear and strong theme about friendship, and it works really well with this.

Then the second half gets started and suddenly it’s about… family or something? That’s okay I guess, because it had some episodes that dealt with family before the second half hit anyway. But the friendship theme is gone entirely, and that’s not okay. Plus, it suddenly becomes mainly about overcoming adversity near the end. What in the world? These kinds of thematic switches probably happen very frequently in most anime, but Suite Precure was one of the few series where it felt jarring to me, and where it completely abandoned themes it started out with.

It’s not as if I dislike these individual parts of Suite Precure. I actually really love how a lot of parts of its story were handled. In particular, the parts dealing with friendship and the final villain’s motivations and thought processes will always hold a special place in my heart. They just don’t all feel like they mix well into a whole, and there’s really no forgiving the missteps they made with the characters I described above.

Those long stretches of episodes without merit I mentioned before? They could have had some merit if the character interaction or development was as good as it was in the first half of the series. But they messed up and didn’t try to fix it, so there are a lot of worthless episodes that don’t even have much in the way of entertainment value.

Overall, I really liked Suite Precure, but even I can’t ignore all of its problems. It’s actually rather difficult to decide if I would recommend it or not, because there are parts that are just done so well, but are offset by the parts that were done horribly. I could just recommend it to people who are intrigued, or to people who already like magical girl shows. Yeah, let’s do that. Suite Precure is good but problematic, so watch it if you’re intrigued or if you like magical girl shows.

tl;dr Any show that’s convinced that sad music is the one true evil definitely has some mental issues it needs to work out before it can be good date material.

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7 thoughts on “Suite Precure”

There were definitely a lot of problems with Suite PreCure, but as you’ve said, the stock footage is the best in the franchise and perhaps the most well-done overall in the genre, even. The four-girl transformation is really something special, since it’s a single scene that incorporates the girls together, unlike that of Smile and Yes 5 which cuts between girls transforming, and that of Heartcatch, which tries to cut in a way that blends them together, but really does so awkwardly. I could write an entire post on this, but in short, Suite is easily the pinnacle of transformation.

That said, your points about the theme in the show are in sync with my thoughts as well, but I thought there was another theme that remained somewhat constant, which involved the whole concept of music as something wonderful that exists in the world, and how it can help bring people together, not just as friends, but as the family and community that you mentioned. To bring up what you said at the end, the show was really interesting in how the music theme was brought out through the introduction of Noise, and story-wise, I was quite open to how his story was resolved and what the show was trying to say in resolving it in this way.

Generally speaking, you really hit the nail on the head with this show. I personally wouldn’t recommend this to most people, especially as an introductory series to the PreCure franchise. However, it’s something interesting enough that it’s worth seeing if you’re already a huge fan, and have already seen a number of other ones like Futari wa, Heartcatch, and Smile. Someone who’s watched those three will probably not get much more out of Splash Star because of Futari wa, wouldn’t get much out of Fresh because of Heartcatch, nor Yes 5 because of Smile. What’s left is a very “out there” work in Suite, which is a show entirely on its own. Bonus points for people who enjoy music, because the OST is the best thing that Takanashi did in his career, in my opinion.

You should write a post about the transformation scenes! I think there’s a lot that can be said about them. Actually, just from that comment it looks like there’s a lot that you in particular have to say about them. I want to read this currently nonexistent post!

Now that you mention it, I think you’re right about the music bringing everyone together theme being prevalent for the entire series. It seemed like it was more in the background than other themes, but it did keep them all connected. That actually makes me feel better about it.

And yes, the music in Suite Precure really is amazing. I’m not sure if it’s my favourite from Takanashi or not. It’s been wrestling with Shiki’s soundtrack in my mind for a while now. There are definitely a lot of really great songs that I’ll probably never forget, though.

I absolutely LOVED Suite Precure. On the other hand, I can see how Suite Precure may be difficult to understand without an understanding of metaphysics. The premise behind Suite Precure is more than just music, but harmony.

In the West, harmony is generally only seen in relationship to music, but there is a deeper metaphysical harmony, which governs all things. The Japanese word for this is wa and the opposite of wa is fuwa, or discord. Wa is the harmony which governs the movement of the heavens and all human relationships, as well as the harmony of music. If you understand the relationship between music and wa, it is easier to see how all of the interpersonal relationship difficulties in the show play into this theme. The Big Boss, Noise, is the embodiment of fuwa!

Wa is closely related to the concept of amity or love. If you notice, the Queen of Major Land is Queen Aphrodite (the Greek name for Venus). The show develops this concept by showing how disruptions of amity disturb wa.

Also related to the concept of harmony or wa, is that individuals are supposed to blend into the whole. Japan is a communal society, rather than an individualistic one, so as you see, one by one the characters start as individuals and then start to blend together into a whole. If you have ever sung in a choir, you may remember that in a choir, your voice is supposed to blend with all of the other voices. If your voice stands out, that is not good.

From a metaphysical perspective the end of Suite Precure is PHENOMENAL! The ending incorporates deep spiritual concepts that baffle most Western philosophers. I will not say anymore in case people are reading who have not seen the series. I was at the edge of my seat for the entire ending.

Thank you for your indulgence with my metaphysical and philosophical discourse. Of course, one could watch Suite without knowing any of this, but I think it really makes the show much, much richer understanding these things.

I want you to create a blog and write more things like this in it. That was really interesting, and does help me view Suite Precure in a different light, although my opinion of it as a viewer remains mostly unchanged. I really do love and respect it when fiction does things like this, but sometimes those things are not good ideas from the standpoint of those who just want to sit down and enjoy what they’re seeing on screen rather than the thoughts and ideas behind it.

I don’t mean that I don’t like to think about what I watch, though. The example you gave with the characters starting out as clear individuals and gradually melding together into one as part of the harmony aspect… That’s something I can appreciate only when I distance myself from the act of watching the anime. Even with those thoughts in mind, it takes away from my enjoyment while watching to have characters lose their individuality like that.

That’s actually why I’ll never finish reading Umineko; it was too clever in how it continuously presented more and more supernatural aspects more and more blatantly to make the reader give up on trying to figure out how these things could be possible without magic (which is exactly what was going on in the story, really). One of the main draws for me was the mystery aspect, so having that stamped out just made me completely lose interest even though I felt that the very thing that made me stop reading was a really awesome aspect of the storytelling.

Oh, thank you for your kind words about my comment. I actually do write for a blog, http://happyinnocentmusumesenshi.wordpress.com/, along with some friends who are much smarter than I am. We talk about a lot of different things, such as Lolita and Japanese culture, but we also have an anime section. Right now, we mostly talk about Precure, though, because we have all fallen in love with Precure.

I think it *is* more difficult as a Westerner to watch these things, but I think Precure is written primarily for Japanese children. In the West, children are taught a very modern scientific worldview from very early on; whereas in the East, spirituality and metaphysics are not quite so separate from everyday life. I am not sure if you have seen Futari wa Pretty Cure, but I found it very interesting some of what the girls learned. For example, at the planetarium, they were taught the Tanabata legend related to the constellations, and at training camp, they were taught about the mountain god.

It probably is a matter of culture that makes it harder for me to appreciate these aspects of Suite Precure. While spirituality was abundant in my childhood, it was all taught to me by a small handful of my family members. Aside from those few, none of the rest of my family or the people I met outside of it were like that; they were all people who only had that scientific worldview. I don’t think metaphysics ever even came into play.

Hopefully with time I’ll become more accustomed to it, so I can enjoy these things more actively. Thanks again for pointing out and explaining all of that!